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How to work with me?

2017 I quit my job at Small Improvements. I made the decision to move on after being 2,5 years a software engineer at this great company. It was a tough decision to make, because the company had a huge impact on me from a personal and professional perspective. It is always hard to move on. But then again, I didn’t want to get too comfortable. And I don’t want to get stuck in one particular lifestyle either. I want to experience different things!

The next step natural step for me was being self-employed. Over the last years, I’ve put a lot of effort into my website and I started teaching people about software engineering, web development, JavaScript, tools such as Webpack, Firebase, Redux, React, Node, … and Machine Learning. I received great feedback over these months and I am so grateful for it. I had a strict routine: my day job was 9 to 6 and every other free minute would go into my open source projects and website. It was a tough time to balance personal life, professional life and (professional) side-projects.

Now, I want to be bold and try to make this next step to have more time for the things that I truly value. I would separate these into four cornerstones: teaching, making, working and volunteering. Find more about these cornerstones in the article in order to work with me.

Teaching

The first cornerstone of my endeavour is teaching. Writing about my own learnings in web development started as a sheer experiment. I enjoyed the process of writing, digging into the problems by trying to explain them to myself, and bringing the solutions on paper in concrete yet simple words. I never expected others to read about them. Yet, I grew an audience of over thousands of daily readers. Many people supported me in my doings and they gave me the opportunity to teach; an activity that I discovered as a meaningful thing to do in my life.

I want to continue teaching others. So far, I have written two ebooks about learning React with advanced state management such as Redux and MobX, published articles in print magazines, got more ebooks about Firebase and GraphQL in the pipeline, and launched a platform to help people learn React. By shifting my life to being self-employed, I hope I can gather enough resources to lift this endeavour to the next level. In addition, I count on all the support I get from you to keep going with it. The community in React and general JavaScript is a great inspiration for me and motivates me to keep going. It would mean a lot to me if I could continue teaching others and keep learning myself.

Your opportunities to work with me:

Are you building a great library, framework or third-party integration relevant to JavaScript? Together, we could find a way to offer other developers a way to dive into your solution by giving them a beginner friendly tutorial. Exposure is always a great way to find an audience for your idea and my website has grown to a large audience of readers over the last years.

Is your company looking for exposure to attract software engineers and web developers? I offer to place a text about your company and your open positions in front of each of my articles for a period of time as subtle advertisement. Your company name, a couple of words about it and a link to your open positions would show up to attract potential candidates for your endavour. At this point in time, this website got enough readers to make this an interesting opportunity for you. Contact me to get the details about website impressions and how this would work out in detail.

Do you want to teach others? My biggest advice is to start a personal blog yourself. But if you just want to get started in contributing to a community of like minded people in the domain of React, you can checkout this Slack Community where people help each other to learn React. Otherwise, feel free to reach out to me regarding quality guest blog posts to boost your personal audience or even paid blog posts. I can give you all the details then.

Do you want to support me so that I can continue providing (free) teaching material? Checkout my Patreon and be my Patron. I would love to have you on board! Otherwise, check out my about me page to find out about more ways to support me.

Making

The second cornerstone of my next endeavour is making new stuff. While I worked in my last 9 to 6 job, I collected a huge list of ideas over time. I guess most of the people are keeping such a list, but there is never enough time to tackle all of these items. Recently, it was the first time that I showed my ideas to someone else. I was astonished that I had gathered over 1000 items in various lists and sublists.

All these items are ideas about applications, things I want to learn, things I would like to teach and things I want to write about. But as full-time employee, I never found the time to do all these things. Maybe I even don’t find the time right now, where I have to figure out how to earn my own share, but that’s what this adventure is all about.

A couple of things that I have built or contributed along the way. Just if you are curious and want to check them out:

In addition, I would consider other opportunities, too, which would enable me to dive deeper into the following topics. They are not in any particular order:

Programming Languages:

Python

Reason

Elixir

Domains:

Machine Learning

VR (WebVR, ReactVR, …)

Tech in Web and JS:

GraphQL

WASM

Your opportunities to work with me:

Are you a freelancer yourself and looking for work? I try to assemble a team of reliable, communicative, skilled and “able to meet a client’s needs” freelancers to work with me. Even though I am self-employed myself, I get plenty of requests every day but cannot accept all of them. That’s where I would love to give you the opportunity to work with me on these projects. If you are interested, shoot me a mail with a cover letter, your availabilities (time/place) and skills.

Working: Consulting and Freelancing

All this jabbering about being self-employed, making and teaching doesn’t work without generating any income whatsoever. That’s why my third cornerstone is consulting and freelancing. After working for years with like minded colleagues in the 9 to 6 world, I always wanted to give consulting a shot in my life. Now I thought it would be the perfect time. I would love to work closely with clients on applications and solving their problems. In this scenario, I am able to shift from being a consultant, who is giving advice and a clear strategy for the application, to being a freelancer who can deep dive into the code and solve problems for you.

So, if you are seeking for a on-site/remote german/english speaking software engineer, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I want to work with you on your web, mobile or embedded applications.

Your opportunities to work with me:

Do you have a product idea but can’t execute it yourself? I am able to build a MVP for you from scratch. It would be a vertical cut through all the technologies from the client-side application, connecting it to a database, deploying and hosting it. Along the way, it should solve the most complex problems of your use case. Afterward, it can go even beyond the initial MVP which is up to you. It’s your opportunity to have me as dedicated developer to bootstrap your idea in an effective and efficient way.

Does your company consider a migration to web technologies but no one is there for a proper on-boarding? I gathered plenty of experiences in the domain of web development, software engineering and JavaScript during the last years, especially in JavaScript, and can help you transitioning to it. In my recent company, I made the exact same experiences by migrating from a Java Wicket application to a Angular application and from a Angular 1.x to React. There were a lot of challenges to overcome. It’s your opportunity to have me as your helping hand for this endavour.

Does your application need more contributing developers? In the past, I have collected enough knowledge to work efficiently in large code bases with a team and different workflows and tools. I would want to be invested in your project, to learn about it, but also to earn my share. The other way around, you get a reliable developer who is eager to have an impact in your tech stack, who solves complex problems, and who is keen to work with your team.

Do you need a quality check of your JavaScript code base? I conduct code audits that can happen on a 1 - 2 day basis. You would give me access to your code base, give me a briefing in terms of an overview and problems about it, and I would review it for the next day(s). Afterward, I will have a personal call with you to give you valuable suggestions on how to improve the source code. Reach out to me for further details.

Does your company want to get involved in open source to attract potential candidates for your development department? I can help you to spot and extract potential features from your code base and enable everyone to use it as an open source library. Open sourcing makes companies attractive for candidates, because you as a company give something back to the community.

Volunteering

As a software engineer, it is too easy to get lost in your tech bubble without thinking about any third-parties and just stick to a certain group of people. But as I see it, it is so valuable to step outside of your bubble to broaden your horizon and to be there for others. Software engineers are often privileged to do such a step. Living a different lifestyle and then again having the opportunity to step in for others.

That’s why I made the decision that I want to accomplish all the previous cornerstones, teaching, making and consulting, from abroad. I want to immerse in different cultures and countries, trying to avoid to be exposed to the tech bubble all the time, and get as much as inspiration from the people in these countries and their culture.

I always found it meaningful to give something back to less blessed people. When traveling, I don’t want to spend my days as a tourist in a foreign country. I want to have an impact while traveling. Especially, I want to be able to leave an impact on children’s education in developing countries by teaching myself or educating others about it. I deeply hope that I will get to know those small organizations that want to make a change where I can have an impact and spend some of my remaining time outside of the tech bubble.

Your opportunities to work with me:

Are you from a developing country and want to get into tech? You are learning about JavaScript and React but cannot effort to pay for the education? You can enrol in my courses for free. Simply create an account on Road to React and reach out to me with your email address which you have used on the platform. I will unlock all the content for you.

Do you have a platform where you sell educational content? You should consider not only the western market as your target group. Think about the people who are left out because the prices for the content are too high for them. That’s why I built this Purchasing Parity Power API for JavaScript. You can use it as opt-in functionality on your course platform to make things affordable for others around the world.

It is an exciting time for me right now. At the moment, I am working with companies in Berlin remotely migrating their tech stack to web technologies. So if your company is keen to work with me on such things, or mentioned opportunities from the list, reach out to me. Otherwise, there are a couple of ways to simply support me. Looking forward to hearing from you :-)